Carter carried
Massachusetts with 56.11% of the vote to Ford's 40.44%, a 15.67% margin of victory. In a distant third was
Independent candidate
Eugene McCarthy, a former Democratic Senator from
Minnesota known for his anti-war activism, who took 2.58%.

As Carter narrowly defeated Ford nationally to win the presidency, Massachusetts weighed in as 13% more Democratic than the national average in the 1976 election.

Massachusetts had been a Democratic-leaning state since
1928, and a Democratic stronghold since
1960, so Carter's win was not unexpected. In
1972, Massachusetts was the only state in the nation to vote for Democrat
George McGovern over Republican
Richard Nixon in the latter's 49-state landslide. McGovern had carried Massachusetts 54–45, despite losing every other state in the midst of a massive Republican landslide.

Ford for his part performed relatively strongly in the state as a moderate Northern Republican, holding at just over 40% of the vote, while Carter gained only slightly over McGovern- even though Carter was winning nationally while McGovern was losing in a landslide. The state's capital and largest city,
Boston, would be one of the few regions in the country where McGovern would actually perform more strongly than Carter in absolute terms.
Suffolk County, where Boston is located, had voted for George McGovern in 1972 by a landslide of 66% versus Richard Nixon's 33%, but in 1976, Carter would only win the county with 61% versus Gerald Ford's 35%. Whereas McGovern had been very popular with urban social liberals in the Northeast in 1972, in 1976 many secular social liberals were turned off by the Southern & evangelical Christian Carter, and the Northern moderate Ford was seen as a preferable alternative to many of these voters in Boston.

In the 1960s, for three elections straight beginning with
John F. Kennedy in 1960, Democrats had won landslides of over 60% of the vote, with Republicans failing to break 40%. Even in the GOP landslide of 1972, Massachusetts had clocked in as a whopping 32% more Democratic than the nation. Thus overall the results of 1976 indicated a slight Republican rebound in the state that would continue into the 1980s.